525,600 Minutes...

How do you measure a year? January 20, 2010 marks President Barack Obamas first year in office. Some cable news shows have been rating Obamas performance using a letter grading system, some have been weighing his first year on a scale from 1-10, and others have simply been marking him as pass or fail. Although most polls show that Americans like the President as a person, there has been a significant decline in his approval rating.

During the 2008 presidential campaign we were swept away in a wave of idealism. Like any new relationship, Americas love affair with Barack Obama started off hot and heavy. We saw a young black man with strong convictions, touching our hearts with eloquent speeches that brought a tear to our eye. He said the most romantic things to us, like “all things are possible”, “this is our moment, this is our time”, and “we are ones we've been waiting for”. So, when Obama got down on bended knee and asked to be our President, we all walked in to that voting booth and said “I do”. With great pride and nervous excitement, we watched as he stood up with his right hand on the bible and made the most solemnest of vows. Now that the honeymoon is over, Americans seem to be having second thoughts. Like many relationships before, the idea of the man we loved failed to compare with the reality of the man we got. Though the Barack that was courting us brought us flowers and promises to fix the economy, the Barack we're living with farts in bed and leaves us with a 10% unemployment rate. Did the President really break all the promises we elected him for? Or did we just build him up so much, there was no place to go but down?

Politifact.com shows President Obama has really only broken 15 of his campaign promises, but has in fact kept 91 of those promises, and has a whopping 275 of his campaign promises currently in the works. Though Obama may not have ended poverty or stopped world hunger as we might have fantasized, he has established a credit card bill of rights and expanded loan programs for small business as he promised. And although we may be disappointed that he broke his promise to allow 5 days of public comment before signing a bill, we can take comfort in the fact that he is working on extending tax cuts for lower incomes, creating a consumer friendly credit card rating system and is working with schools to create a more healthful environment for children.

When we met Barack Obama, we were coming out of a bad relationship with a man who spent all of our money, ruined our credit, and abused his power. In 2012 we will have to decide if Obama was just our rebound President, or if he is the one. Perhaps if we learned to communicate our needs better, instead of just standing outside his house screaming obscenities, then we could all get a lot more out of this relationship. In the meantime he has three more years to prove to us that he truly deserves us, and that he is going to work hard to keep the promises he made, and we have three more years to try to learn the difference between fantasy and reality.